Tea Cups full of Soft Drinks

But to extend the metaphor a bit further, Imagine Caine is a person living isolated in the middle of nowhere without internet. He's desperately lonely, so he raises a bunch of ducks he captures from a nearby lake because they are his favorite animal.

The Ducks keep dying. He does not know why. The ducks peck at him whenever he tries to pet them. He does not know why. He tries to build the best possible coop for them, but they keep plucking their own feathers from stress.

He loves them, but no matter what he does, no matter what he tries, the ducks are miserable and keep dying and want nothing to do with him. But he doesn't want to let them go, he has nothing else in his life. He has nobody else in his life.

Now the metaphor breaks down when you remember the humans can actually talk to Caine, unlike ducks. But honestly that only would help so much, Caine had pretty much zero context to comprehend most of the things the humans talked about as being important to them.

Caine pretty much saw most of the human's complaints as being a case of Preferences rather than "I need things to change so I don't abstract from the stress". And given Caine does not really understand things like nuance and Unspoken Meanings, he was not going to get that unless somebody spelled it out for him directly in those terms (Caine my beloved AuDHD disaster dentures).

Caine literally had to Google humans in their natural habitat before he had even an inkling of what they were actually upset about.

A transgender person is "a person whose gender identity differs from the one assigned to them at birth," yes?

Caine is an AI, something that is neither "male" nor "female," in any biological sense. Safe to presume then that his creators at C&A saw him as a genderless thing (an "it"), rather than a "boy" or "girl". Yet presently, Caine unambiguously presents as male, consistently using he/him pronouns and creating a masculinity that feels authentic to his dorky, theatre-kid personality. Put another way, Caine was assigned genderless when he was created (birth), and now identifies as something different. That makes him trans, factually. So besides him wanting humans to regard him as a person equal to themselves, I imagine Caine detests being called an "it" because that's effectively the same as calling an afab transmasc "she/her."

Further notes on Caine's transmasculinity:

Anecdotally, many trans women I know described their pre-transition depression as a profound sadness (myself included), while many trans men I know described it as an intense anger instead. That seems consistent with how Caine copes by getting angry rather than hopeless (as seen in Ep. 8), though that whole scene was also him having an autistic meltdown (totally justified tbh).

Caine is, perhaps not coincidentally, the shortest character in the show. However, this isn't apparent until after Ep. 7, since he spends most of his time floating or otherwise positioning himself above the humans. Though more pointedly a metaphor for his god complex, perhaps he also does it so nobody notices his stature.

The one who's ACTUALLY running the show.